Is the wood used to make fire in stoves, fireplaces or kitchens. It is one of the simplest forms of biomass used mostly for heating and cooking. It is extracted from the trees.
This is normally sold in bulk or bales, but with new storage and logistics techniques, it is currently distributed in palletized and bagged bags, as well as packed in multiple ways.
Charcoal is made with wood, and usually about 5 tons of wood produces 1 ton of charcoal. Therefore, the manufacture of coal can be a stable industry only where the resource, wood raw material, is ordered to provide a continuous supply. For each person in a community that uses charcoal for heating and cooking, about 0.5 ha of high natural forest should be reserved to perpetuate the wood supply. If the wood comes from well-ordered plantations of firewood, a tenth of said surface would suffice. However, for its timely management, plantations may have their requirements as well as the need to be assigned land of better quality, which may be required for the production of food.
Although the wood used for charcoal can sometimes be derived from sawmill waste or from field cleaning operations, in the end this does not have a long-term impact on the demand for forest land or wood plantations. This chapter will discuss the logical steps for the wood assortment.
Natural forests for firewood
The science of forest management is too complex to be discussed in this manual. It is sufficient to note some characteristics of the growth and yield of the natural forest, which affect the supply of firewood. The natural forest is a resource that, in the jargon of the economist, has been constituted without contributions of human work. The objective of forest management is to collect a maximum harvest of wood from this forest, without destroying its productivity as an ongoing ecosystem, and at the same time, minimize the necessary inputs to obtain it. The result of this process is stated in the "average annual cut allowed" for a forest, usually expressed in cubic meters per hectare. Theoretically, an equivalent volume can be removed each year and the forest will thus be self-preserved. In practice, human intervention produces long-term changes in the forest, especially in the tropics, by changing the composition of the species and the diameter classes of the mature natural forest, after harvesting and regeneration. Whenever possible, a forest should be ordered to produce the most valuable mix of products - saw and veneer logs have top priority. (15) Firewood has the lowest value - it is wood that normally can not be sold for any other use. In general, its price is lower than that of pulpwood in the paper industry.
The normal method of harvesting a forest is to divide it into compartments or quarters (management areas) and selectively cut trees in turns in each farm, working on the entire forest area for a period of 30 - 50 years, which is defined by " rotation". The purpose is that the harvested barracks will be able to be cut again at the end of the rotation period and, with the prospect of also being enriched with commercial wood, as they were in their natural state. This objective is rarely achieved, in practice, since a rotation (perhaps 40 years or more is a long period of time, in terms of the development process of a country, the population grows, national priorities are modified, of tradable forest species and products change, and the authority of the administration that controls forest operations has its ups and downs, although the objectives of the rational management of natural forests are seldom achieved and never optimized, it is still possible to estimate , in general terms, for an entire region or country - provided inventory values of the area and forest type are available - which can be the annual cut per hectare, in a region, it seems that it can be maintained indefinitely, the forest ecosystem comes partly destroyed or damaged, usually because of irregular intensity of fellings, caused mainly by population density differences It is not difficult to imagine what the final consequences of this process are.
The current commitment - even in countries where forest management is strong and well oriented - is to allocate a certain area of forest for the supply of firewood with an annual allowable cut, or to establish the supposedly sustainable cut level based on knowledge in that moment. The wood exploiter then tries to stay within the allowed cuts, maximizing the felling using efficiently the wood of deadwood, the dead wood and the poor quality wood of small diameter etc., which are not normally included in the volume evaluated on foot for production calculations. To prevent damage to the forest system, however, the authorities that order the forests have to maintain constant control and make measurements, to ensure that the goals of regeneration and growth rates are met, and decide if the allowable cut it can be increased or it has to be reduced.
